1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the invention generally relate to product development and, more specifically, to separation of customer concerns within model architectures.
2. Description of Related Art
No two projects are alike. Project managers often manage several projects at a time and therefore need a process that is flexible and scalable, yet streamlined enough to help keep each project team focused only on what is essential to completing the project successfully.
Given today's sophisticated software systems, it is not possible to sequentially first define the entire problem, design the entire solution, build the software and then test the product at the end. An iterative approach is required that allows an increasing understanding of the problem through successive refinements, and to incrementally grow an effective solution over multiple iterations.
Methodologies for model development such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and the Rational Unified Process for System Engineering (RUP-SE) offer a generic framework for describing the structure and behavior of the model. Best-practices dictate that concerns expressed in the model should be separated to better communicate them to stakeholders.
Design methodologies require a means for separating concerns when creating a model in order to clearly express needs of different stakeholders. In the Rational Unified Process (RUP), such is done by introducing the notion of viewpoints. Each of these viewpoints is mapped to a model that expresses a particular level of abstraction, e.g., Use-case model, design model, implementation model, etc. The Rational Unified Process for Systems Engineering (RUP-SE) offers a slightly richer framework by organizing viewpoints and model levels across two orthogonal dimensions.
Model levels allow representation of the model at four different levels of abstraction. However, model viewpoints are organized such that each of the model viewpoints forms a pair with a model level. One way to express such organization is by using a matrix as shown in Table I. In the matrix, each cell is named a view of the system and each view is given a name. In this representation, the model viewpoints are separating concerns and interest of the system's stakeholders.
Although Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Rational Unified Process System Engineering (RUP-SE) provide with such a framework, there still exist some drawbacks with the earlier known approaches and therefore there is a need to overcome the problems associated with prior known approaches.